I am now clear that - in the aftermath of the Brexit vote - I yielded to a false and counter-productive wish to be swept-up by tidal changes, passively to be led to a better future; I yearned for some new kind of leadership to emerge from the shadows, to take charge of the nation, gather and inspire us, take us to where we ought-be-be...
I also acknowledged that this could not happen without first a general awakening of the people - a repentance of materialism and Leftism and a new spiritual Christianity; but there was certainly some degree of yearning that this whole process would be driven by some kind of externally-applied influence... Rather as if God was to shine a bright light on us and reveal things in a new clarity.
Clearly this hasn't happened, and equally clearly if anything of the sort had seemed to happen it would almost certainly have been a fake of some kind: a deception leading somewhere even worse.
What I have come to believe is that events are building and building upon each of us as free, agent individuals - Especially those (few?) who have not (yet?) capitulated to one or another of the varieties of materialist, secular Leftism which wholly dominate public discourse (including the discourse of nearly all self-identified 'right wing' people and parties, and the mainstream churches, who are apparently monolithically obsessed with economics, politics, power...).
This idea that if things are true, then we ought-to-be overwhelmed by feelings and driven by mass movements is exactly what we need to grow-out-of. And if we don't then we will - sooner or later - join the enemy, or at least fuel the enemy's strength.
I am struck by the fact that we regard thinking as an activity which can (and should) only destroy. It is thinking that has destroyed the unconscious and spontaneous spirituality of our childhood, and of earlier cultural epochs. So thinking is clearly powerful... yet we deny the validity of thinking when it is used to cure the ills of modernity.
We assume that if something good needs thinking-about, then it is not really-real but only a kind of delusion of 'wishful' thinking. We assume that a Life cannot be built from thinking, that thinking is strong enough to destroy, but too weak to be a foundation of good living.
Of course, thinking can be and is manipulated all the time (but so is feeling, even more so!)
I now understand better that truth comes to us in thinking in a way that deliberately and necessarily does not 'overwhelm' us.
After all, is God overwhelmed by His feelings? Surely not! God is free; and so should we be.
We need to be free in the same way as God, and that means primarily by thinking, not feeling (although feeling is, secondarily, a part of valid thinking). Thinking comes to us 'horizontally' - one thought linked with others beside it; and what we should be looking-for is not to be overwhelmed but to experience a kind of 'mythic coherence', that 'insight' which we get when we think our way to a part of Truth.
This is a wonderful feeling, familiar to a scientist who has struggled for a long time to understand; then reaches an answer of simple clarity which coheres with his best knowledge.
Freedom is not really about choice, but about knowing from our true-divine self: we are free because our thinking is not caused by anything external (not by our perceptions, not by our memories; but it arises from our deepest nature -- this being a defining property of the divine... to think as an uncaused cause.)
In sum - instead of the attempt to return to an unfree, child-like state in which reality overwhelms and compels us; I now seek to understand reality as akin to such discoveries I have made in science; characterised by such features as insight, rationality, coherence; and that explanatory fertility which is a characteristic property of some-thing real.
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